What happened to the rise of the hackers? IRC circa 95-00 was full of people begging to be taught how to hack. There was loads of righteous website defacement and every now and again there would be a burst of activity and it felt like we were seconds from a revolution. 7 years on 2600.org are still talking about Kevin Mitnick and there have been no real anti heros of cyber culture since him. It just fizzled out like the Hippy culture of the 60's a group of idealists who did a lot of talking and a lot of weed and achieved nothing. With the current net neutrality scandal and the filtering going on across the world it seems like an ideal time for hacktivists to take up the cause again. Yet they seem to dedicate their time to paypal scams and phishing.

I think you maybe have fewer script kiddies posing as hackers these days. Maybe this explains why there are fewer malicious uses of technology. But it seems like open source has made it more meaningful to be a hacker. Your name can be right out there in the open as a contributor while still bringing down empires. It's a beautiful thing.

"The hackers are still here. It's just that the strategy for building disruptive systems has matured.

It's not necessarily about finding ways of cracking Windows and essentially helping Microsoft troubleshoot their software. The revolution is becoming more organized. Consider open source. Somewhere along the line, hackers decided they were all on the same team (or at least a bunch of smaller teams). It became clear that that one way to slay a Goliath is to build viable alternatives and give them away for free. Linux, Firefox, MySQL, Apache....

You mention net neutrality. We of course need things like BitTorrent. In most cases it's your average (or rather not so average) programmer stepping up to the plate to represent your favorite torrent client. Comcast throttles traffic, FCC puts the smack down, Comcast tries to modify their TOS, customers revolt, back and forth. Again, the hacker spirit of challenging authority is the driving force behind it all.

I think you maybe have fewer script kiddies posing as hackers these days. Maybe this explains why there are fewer malicious uses of technology. But it seems like open source has made it more meaningful to be a hacker. Your name can be right out there in the open as a contributor while still bringing down empires. It's a beautiful thing. "

"I think the best thing that could have happened was the advent of hackers, and their subsequent decline. With all new ""Civilizations"" there are those who wish to solidify the new society, and those who wish to destroy it, and everyone and everything in between. The rise and fall of hackers was bound to happen, and possibly, this rise and fall of the Internet will happen as well. We will see. "

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joe_ramponi

September 19, 2017 05:42 PM

"The internet has changed a lot, kinda like how the cowboys and outlaws changed with the times. You can't go riding out on the town without getting stopped so none of those types are able to build up a reputation like in the old days. Now we are dealing with the al capones and their mobs making the hacking into an illegal business. "